Chair follows orders, but can act on its own, too

Five North­eastern Uni­ver­sity engi­neering seniors have devel­oped an inno­v­a­tive, voice-​​operated wheel­chair that can nav­i­gate through a clut­tered room, move along­side walls and detect stair­wells and other obsta­cles in its path — a project, they say, that is designed to enhance the lives of people with a range of phys­ical impairments.

Their work took first place in the Elec­trical and Com­puter Engi­neering Department’s cap­stone pre­sen­ta­tions last month. The stu­dent team is com­prised of Barry Briggs, Dana Lopes, Shane Mulk­errin, Sam Ben­nett and Thayne Henry, with pro­fessor Bahram Shafai serving as their fac­ulty advisor.

“Just knowing that we were working on some­thing that could really make a dif­fer­ence for someone one day helped to boost our deter­mi­na­tion,” Briggs said.

The user would first mem­o­rize a short list of basic voice com­mands that would move the wheel­chair in dif­ferent direc­tions, stop its move­ment, and acti­vate and deac­ti­vate the system. Speak into a headset, and off goes the wheel­chair, obeying the user’s com­mands via the voice software.

A crit­ical com­po­nent to the stu­dents’ design is an inte­grated net­work of ultra­sonic dis­tance sen­sors that detects obsta­cles ahead and to the side of the wheel­chair. The sen­sors can also deter­mine whether the wheel­chair is approaching a sig­nif­i­cant drop ahead — a set of stairs, for instance. As a safety mea­sure, the system would over­ride user com­mands to avoid such obstacles.

Under the seat is a uni­versal con­trol unit — what the stu­dents call “the heart of the system” — that com­mu­ni­cates with the sensor array, and processes and sends the com­mands to the motor con­troller to move the wheel­chair. Mean­while, a dis­play panel extending from the right arm­rest shows users the cur­rent direc­tion they are going in, and whether they are approaching any barriers.

The project demon­strates Northeastern’s com­mit­ment to use-​​inspired research, par­tic­u­larly in the University’s top research themes of health, sus­tain­ability and security.

While the stu­dents based their cap­stone project around the voice-​​command con­trol system, they said their uni­versal design would make the wheel­chair easy to use and adapt­able to work with other com­mand tech­nolo­gies, such as brain-​​computer inter­face, eye-​​tracking, mouth joy­sticks and hand movement.

“The voice inter­face is an extremely robust system, and this is a flex­ible media that can be extremely useful for the phys­i­cally impaired,” Shafai said. “The stu­dents did a fan­tastic job.”

Stu­dents said their co-​​op expe­ri­ences also played a piv­otal role in devel­oping the project, from sol­dering the sen­sors to the wheel­chair to Lopes’s soft­ware engi­neering expe­ri­ence in robotics at QinetiQ North America.

About the Writer

Greg St. Martin is the senior editor for news@Northeastern. He joined Northeastern in March 2010 after working at a Boston newspaper for six years. Outside the office, he enjoys playing basketball, basking in the glory of finding great parking spots, and listening to the comic genius of Steven Wright. Follow on Twitter: @gstmartinNU

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